Unvarnished versus airbrushed

Don't get sniffy about gossip magazines. When it comes to attitudes towards women, the affectionate fun they poke at imperfect starlets beats the servile deference of the upmarket glossies every time, says Julie Burchill

Take it from someone who buys all the gossip mags - Heat, Now, Closer, Reveal - and sometimes actually gets the same one twice and doesn't realise until the horoscope sounds familiar. (I don't do self-loathing as a rule, but I make a teeny exception when this happens.) Though these mags are slagged off royally by supposedly classy broads, when it comes to their attitudes to women they beat rags like Elle and Marie Claire hands down.

Consider the evidence: namely, that the famous women we see in the gossip mags are gloriously, recognisably human. In chav-mag land, beauty comes and goes with smoke and mirrors - it's all a construct and, as such, liable to fall apart at any time, which means that the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady (or Jade Jagger and Jade Goody in this case) are sisters under the skin. Who doesn't enjoy seeing younger, prettier, richer versions of themselves stumbling about tipsily, having forgotten to colour their roots, apply deodorant, wax their upper lips and St Tropez their ankles?

The allegedly "classy" magazines often seem to be in an endless, undeclared competition to see who can climb furthest up the fundament of Gwyneth Paltrow or Jennifer Lopez. Nicole Kidman in particular seems to bring out the butt-kisser in the sassiest of hackettes, as they ceaselessly strive to portray her as some sort of cross between Mother Teresa and Marilyn Monroe. In the January edition of Marie Claire, for instance, an interview with her describes a woman in turn "fragile" and "hopeful", whose face is "expressive" and laugh lines "evident", and who doesn't read her press because she is "more concerned with people who have real problems: 'I've got a friend with bad rheumatoid arthritis, another who's battling throat cancer and my sister has just gone through a divorce'." (The equation of the three is unintentionally hilarious.)

Believe the journalist and this is a woman to whom perfection comes naturally: "It's part of my life to do some kind of exercise every day. I play tennis, go for a run, swim, dance or do yoga." But don't think for a moment that she's just some narcissistic gym bunny - her mum was a nurse, so the young Nicole and her sister (the terminally divorced one?) used to "hang out" after school at the hospital: "We'd do our homework then help out on the ward, emptying bedpans and whatnot. That's why I'm so at ease around sickness. My parents would bring home films of people being operated on - that's how we learned about sex, that's how we learned about everything." Eww!

The piece ends with Kidman talking on the phone to the bedazzled interviewer on a cold, stormy weekend in Sydney, about to give up her one day off that week to rehearse with a child actor who's having trouble remembering his lines. "I prefer the company of children; if I'm having a dinner party and people want to bring their children, I say bring them and put them at the table. They play and I still like to, too. Maybe that's childish and childlike, but that's me. I don't care if I'm 40: sometimes, I'm five." To which I say give me Girls Aloud legless any day! Or, even better, the chav princess and thespian extraordinaire Billie Piper, who took the amazingly original and honest step of banning her husband's posh family from bringing their brats to her recent wedding, thus earning the wrath of yummy mummies everywhere.

In the world of Sarah Harding, Kerry Katona and the ultimate babe-turned-Mother-Courage, Jordan, life is messy and imperfect and utterly recognisable, even if it is played out more publicly and in a higher tax bracket from most of us. Indiscreet, open-hearted and down-to-earth, these women make the cocooned, copy-approving, control-freak thoroughbreds of Hollywood look like deracinated freaks. Here, glamour girls become columnists and agony aunts as they grow older; their Botox bouts, breast enhancements and eating disorders are freely discussed, not the stuff of paranoid denial as they are in the classier rags.

"Beauty is as beauty does" is the message that runs through the likes of Now and Closer; that's why the diet/detox/gym mantra that swamps them at this time of year is somehow less irritating than it might be. This is not the middle-class, self-punishing joylessness of a Liz Jones or one of the other Daily Mail she-males, who attack their bodies (Jones calls her endless waxings "harvestings") with all the desperation of particularly hairy transvestites. Rather, it is the promise-made-to-be-broken of the irretrievable good-time girl who knows that she will fall off the wagon as soon as she gets a sniff of the barman's apron, but who thinks that she should "show willing" by putting her best foot forward at the start of each new year as a mark of respect to life itself. Think Ida from Brighton Rock whose mildly debauched decency finally did for Pinkie's thoroughly fastidious murderousness.

"Ooh, a hundred years of feminism gone down the drain!" a certain sort of killjoy Jeremiah is wont to whinge when they see a civilian chick sniggering over a Heat snapshot of some starlet's un-fake-tanned ankles. To which I would reply no, it's you that's a disgrace to our living, mutating feminism, with your apparent feeling that to be a "proper" woman one must never bitch, smirk or get a cheap laugh out of someone wealthier's imperfections. So a woman should be pure in thought, word and sense of humour, eh? A veritable Angel of the Hearth, indeed! How very Victorian - and how very boring.

These women whose antics we smirk at good-naturedly in the pap-traps put themselves out there at least partly on their beauty; they are in showbiz, and showing what they've got is part of their business as much as it is for male show-ponies from the Chippendales to George Clooney. To ignore it when they fall short of the quality that they are supposed to have over the rest of us would be as fawningly over-protective as ignoring the shortcomings of a self-proclaimed great singer who suddenly can't hit the notes.

The secret is not to care what anyone thinks of you. Frankly, anyone who flinches whenever a bad photo of them is printed shouldn't be in the public eye, poor delicate dear, but sitting on a silk cushion in a corner somewhere sewing a fine seam.

The message of the pap-trap chav-mags would appear on the surface to be as reactionary as that of the old song, "Keep young and beautiful/ It's your duty to be beautiful/ Keep young and beautiful/ If you want to be loved." But dig a little deeper and their real deal is that beauty comes and goes like dust in the wind and that young, rich, beautiful, celebrated women since the dawn of time have experienced every bit as much trauma and loss as the rest of us. So next time you sternly attempt to resist sniggering at a scabby ankle in Heat and turn instead to worship at the laughably airbrushed and copy-approved altar of the upmarket glossies (thinking them to be the politically sounder choice), think twice.